National Poetry Month: Guest Post from Naomi Shihab Nye: On Language-Energy
American School of Bombay, February 2014
Jackhammers pounding, a whole block torn up. Lively Kohinoor neighborhood in some dramatically mixed condition of process and decay. Ancient India of fluttering flags and open cook shops right down that skinny alleyway, mixing with giant apartment complexes where many teachers live, and a sweetly designed new hotel with ELITE in its name.
Naomi and Calum.
Are the workers putting in new pipes? Good luck to them. Every element of infrastructure for this smoky-smelling 20.5 million mega-city boggles the brain. I lie awake thinking – how could anything work at all? How does water emerge from a faucet? Electricity, seriously? I am not surprised at all when the wireless connection doesn’t work on the 5th floor. How could it? We actually crossed a street yesterday and are still alive?
In such a mood I passed through Security into yet another inspiring school in this crazy crowded world, rode an elevator, entered the third grade and was swept away by Poetry Joy! Words surrounding us on giant papers! Definitions, drawings, wide windows…an instant sense of language-energy on the air.
Radiant teacher Nancy, from Michigan, loves and writes poetry too. All the teachers and their beautiful librarian Heeru seem like creative wizards to me, the lucky guest who’s been writing down favorite signs since I arrived in India – PLEASE DO NOT THROW FLOWERS INTO THE SEA, EVEN GOD WOULD NOT APPROVE or DON’T EAT HEAVY MEALS AFTER 5 P.M. or FIGHT THE BITE (then a drawing of an ominous-looking mosquito). One thing for certain: you may travel many places on earth but you will never, never, find better signs than the signs in India.
Greenwillow Books, August 2014.
And it has always seemed so easy and natural to talk about poetry in India, this vast land of ancient voices and mixed languages…my first trip to India 30 years ago someone in a library asked how it feels to live in a country (the United States) with “such a short soul.” I remember feeling thunderstruck, then remembered how I often shared a 2,000 year old “family poem” by someone called Vishnavath with my Texas students.
Today as usual I jabber a little poetry talk to get us going – read a few poems, discuss keeping notebooks, ask questions about their notebooks or writing practices – and a boy from New Zealand, Calum, toward the back, pipes up – “It’s as if invisible rubber bands connect me to my notebook and are always pulling me back.” Boing! My brain flips. Thank you, Calum! Excuse me a moment, I have to write that down…later he’ll say something like, “We’re tree trunks and everything around us is our branches, we’re connected to everything…” and again, I must write this on my new Calum page in front of me and I think of this boy’s shining life in the world, his radiant way with words and feel heartened again, so heartened, as anyone who lives in a world of continuously “breaking news” must be when they hear – one true voice.
Naomi Shihab Nye. (Photo by Michael Nye.)
Naomi Shihab Nye was named a National Book Award finalist for 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE: Poems of the Middle East. The author has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and four Pushcart Prizes, as well as numerous honors for her books for younger readers, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. She is also the editor of the poetry anthologies IS THIS FOREVER, OR WHAT?: Poems and Paintings from Texas; THE SPACE BETWEEN OUR FOOTSTEPS: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East; SALTING THE OCEAN; WHAT HAVE YOU LOST?; THIS SAME SKY; and TIME YOU LET ME IN; as well as the author of the novels HABIBI, and the upcoming THE TURTLE OF OMAN, the essay collection I’LL ASK YOU THREE TIMES, ARE YOU OKAY?, the short story collection THERE IS NO LONG DISTANT NOW, the picture books BABY RADAR, SITTI’S SECRETS and COME WITH ME, and the poetry collections HONEYBEE and A MAZE ME. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.
